This is a pageaboutwriting your first article, not the place to actually write it. If you would like to experiment, please use the sandbox.

Welcome to BattleTechWiki! This is a guide to some important things you should know before creating your first encyclopedia article.

Be bold.

Sign in with your account name. If you do not have an account, you should create one. (Unregistered users can write articles as well as anyone, but users who register and sign in can create trust and a positive name for themselves.)

Please don't try to promote your product or business. Please don't insert external links to your commercial website unless a neutral party would judge that the link truly belongs in the article; we do have articles about BattleTech products, but if you are writing about a product or business be sure you write from a neutral point of view.

Copying things. Do not violate copyrights. To be safe, do not copy more than a couple of sentences of text from anywhere, and document any references you do use. You can copy material that you are sure is in the public domain, but even for public domain material you should still document your source. We all are here because of your interest in BattleTech; the best way to keep the line healthy and fresh is to encourage investment in the canon materials. Reprinting them here does the exact opposite.

Good research and citing your sources. Articles written out of thin air are better than nothing, but they are hard to verify, which is an important part of building a trusted reference work. Please research with the best sources available to you and cite them properly. Doing this, along with not copying large amounts of the text, will help avoid any possibility of plagiarism.

Advocacy and controversial material. Please do not write articles that advocate one particular viewpoint on factions, politics, religion, BattleTech line or anything else. Understand what we mean by a neutral point of view before tackling this sort of topic.

Redundant articles. BattleTechWiki already has a lot of articles. Before creating an article, try to make sure there isn't already an article, perhaps under a slightly different name. If an article on your topic is there, but you think people are likely to look for it under some different name or spelling, learn how to add a redirect with that name; adding needed redirects is a good way to help BattleTechWiki. Also, remember to check the article's deletion log in order to avoid creating an article that has already been deleted.

Extremely short articles that are just definitions. Try to write a good short paragraph that says something about the subject. We welcome good short articles, called "stubs", that can serve as launching pads from which others can take off. If you don't have enough material to write a good stub, you probably should not create the article. At the end of a stub, you should include a "stub template" like this: {{stub}}. It helps track articles that need expansion. Definitions belong in the Dictionary.

Questionable

Better

A close-up is a shot in a movie taken with the camera close to the actors.

A close-up is a shot in a movie taken with the camera close to, or zoomed in on, the actors. Close-ups are typically brief, and are used to draw attention to the actor's expression. Close-ups are an important part of film grammar. D. W. Griffith invented the close-up as we know it.